


She, It, They, Us

by cailures



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-25
Updated: 2014-08-25
Packaged: 2018-02-14 12:39:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2192181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cailures/pseuds/cailures
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She did it just the way Tomas showed her.</p>
<p>It was scary at first, intimidating.  The smell bothered her.  He said she’ll get used to it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	She, It, They, Us

**Author's Note:**

> FOR #16

She did it just the way Tomas showed her.

It was scary at first, intimidating. The smell bothered her. He said she’ll get used to it. She wiped wetness off her forehead with the back of her hand, grimaced as liquid dripped down to her lips. It tasted disgusting. But it was worth it. When she looked in the mirror, her newly bleached hair did look like an angel’s halo. 

-

She hadn’t believed him at first. It wasn’t uncommon for strange men to show up at the convent, but it was uncommon for the nuns to let them in. Olga told her stories about men who wanted to adopt little girls to play with or touch or hurt or even eat. Olga said the girl who had Helena’s bed before had been taken by a man who slit her open and boiled her brains in oil. 

Helena had no idea what her brains looked like, so she couldn’t really envision them in a pot, being stirred and poked at by the odd man who sat in front of her. He slid a picture across the table. Her, but not her. Different clothes, different hair. 

She spoke in her native language, but he held up a hand. “English. I know you speak English.”

“This is trick.” She pushed the picture back towards him. “That is not me.”

“No. That is not you. She’s a copy. A fake. Her name is Aryanna Giordano and she lives far away from her, somewhere called Italy.”

“I know about Italy. They teach school here.” Helena picked up the picture again, looked closer. “You cannot copy person. They make sheep. Baaaa.”

“If you know about the sheep, I’m sure the nuns have also taught you that human copying is an abomination.”

“Unto God,” she repeats mindlessly. 

“My name is Tomas.” He took back the picture, then held out his hand. “I’m here to take you away, teach you how to rid the world of these abominations. How to destroy the people who have stolen your soul.”

“The nuns will not let you…” She trailed off as she saw the streak of red on his palm. It was then that she noticed that the convent was quiet. She noticed the smear of blood on the wall.

“I did not give them a choice.”

-

There were dogs at the convent, so she hesitated for a moment. She remembered the feel of soft under their hand, the smell of wet in her nose, the sound of barking in her ears. 

Her hand trembled a bit as she moved the knife; her first cut wasn’t strong enough, so she had to make another. The blood spilled on her fingers and Tomas laughed when she lifted her hand to her mouth to taste it, when she spit it out.

-

He didn’t let her finish it, the first time. She had been watching for three days, getting angrier with each day. Watching the imposter with her hair (red streaks, didn’t match the picture Tomas showed her), her ears (multiple earrings, shiny, dangling), her eyes (painted purple to match her dress). It. Her, not her.

Her hand was steady, this time. 

The impostor dropped its keys, laughed. It had been drinking. It said something in an odd language and Helena’s grip tightened as she stepped closer, met the impostor’s confused eyes. 

Helena blinked and suddenly there was a red spot on the impostor’s forehead. Dark red, growing, slipping, dripping, as it fell. It hadn’t heard the gunshot. Helena hadn’t heard the gunshot. A hand gripped her arm, twisted it behind her back, so hard she thought her bones would crack. 

“You said you were ready,” Tomas hissed in her ear. 

“I was. I am. You did not give me enough time.”

“She would have seen you. She would have asked questions.”

He released her arm so he could grab her hair, yank her head down. He didn’t let go until they were at the car. She moved towards the door and he shoved her up against the metal, pulled her back. He popped the trunk and she knew better to resist. She climbed in. At least it was dark, quiet. She slept.

-

“The uterus looks like a cross.”

She stared at the picture, unsure of what he meant. It looked like a cow head, or those needles the doctor at the convent had. 

“The uterus is meant only to serve God. These men have perverted nature to serve their own purpose.” He held a dirty mirror up to her face. “They have taken your perfection and corrupted it.”

“And they must suffer,” she repeated mindlessly. “Why can you not kill them?”

“You see what they have done to you. They’ve stolen your soul.”

Helena took the mirror from him, narrowed her eyes at her own reflection. Talk of souls had always confused her. She couldn’t touch her soul, feel it, smell it, taste it. All she had was their word that it existed at all. The nuns said there were studies of bodies, weighed before and after death. The nuns said that the bodies weighed less after the souls had departed. 

Olga said it was because when you die, you piss and shit yourself.

But when Tomas showed her the picture of the Italian impostor, there was a tightness in her chest that she couldn’t account for. Looking at it, she felt like there was something missing in her. Something that maybe it had. Maybe this was why she was in the orphanage for so long, why other girls came and went with new families and she stayed in the same bed, next to Olga, for years. Nobody wanted Olga because her father had thrown boiling water on her face when she was young. She was ugly and vulgar and violent.

Maybe nobody wanted Helena because they could see she had no soul.

“I need to take it back.” She hadn’t even realized she spoke until she heard her voice.

Tomas just smiled.

-

Tomas took her out to the woods to show her how to fire a gun.

“With this, you don’t have to be close. You don’t have to look them in the eyes.”

It was easier. A simple pull of the finger and the little piece of metal would end it. But she had become obsessed, now, with the idea that these other things had bits of her soul. How could she retrieve them from a distance? Did she have to be staring into their eyes? Did she have to breathe in their last bit of air? Maybe if she just put her hand over their hearts, felt the last beat-beat-beat.

Still, she practiced. Practiced until it was perfect.

-

Olga had shown her how to cut, how to do it in places where the nuns wouldn’t see, how to hide the razor blades. 

She didn’t have to hide anything from Tomas.

-

It was perfect, the second time. The blow to the head, the slice of the knife. The impostor fell down and she flipped the body over. She had to see. She had to watch.

Its mouth moved, even as the blood flowed from its neck. Its eyes were wide and she watched in fascination as one pupil expanded and the other shrunk. She poked one, then the other, eliciting a tiny gasp. 

Out of curiosity, she pressed their lips together. She thought she would feel something, or taste something, something unique and special.

The impostor tasted like coffee. Nothing else.

-

She had planned to etch the names on her thigh. She would take her razor blade and carefully cut the names into her skin, one by one, until they were all gone.

But when two were dead, when she was sitting on the floor with the blade in her hand, Helena realized she couldn’t deface her skin with the names of sheep.

-

She didn’t understand why Tomas didn’t do something when she tripped, when she dropped the knife, when the impostor calling itself Danielle saw her.

She expected a bullet. Instead, the sheep embraced her, called her sister.

-

Helena let it take her home. Everything was shiny or fluffy, pink and bright. Everything smelled like the cake the nuns would make, sometimes, if they were good. The impostor called Danielle wouldn’t stop talking. About the website. About its story. About its adoption. About how it knew it had real family somewhere. About how it had been looking.

She didn’t know where Tomas was. Why he wasn’t doing something.

“We should drink.” It put a glass in front of her.

It wasn’t the first time Helena had wine, but it tasted different this time. “It’s a ’77,” it said. “I was keeping it for special occasion. Like finding my sister.”

“77 what? Grapes?”

It made an odd face, the same kind Olga used to get. The face people made when they walked by her and saw the scars, the patch with no hair.

Maybe Olga was dead. Maybe Tomas had killed her when he killed the nuns.

“You have had rough life, oui? You poor thing.” 

“It is my life,” Helena said. Give it back, she wanted to say, but it interrupted.

“We will go shopping tomorrow. You are my sister. I want to buy you things.”

She slept in its’ spare bedroom. Everything was soft and somehow smelled like flowers. She hated it.

-

The bags were heavy and Helena didn’t understand why she was doing this. It kept buying shirts and pants and hats. She stopped in front of a plastic man with no head and stared at the green jacket it wore, fingered the fur on the hood.

“Sister, sister,” it said. “That is a man’s coat, and entirely too large for you. I want to buy you pretty things.”

She just kept touching the fur. It felt real, like the dogs at the convent, like the dogs Tomas brought her. She slid the coat off the plastic man and slipped her arms into the sleeves. It felt like swimming.

“Okay, sister.” It put its arm around her. “If this is what you want, you shall get it.”

-

What she liked the most about the coat was how easily blood washed off it.


End file.
